


The Wanting

by henrywinters



Category: VIXX
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Drug Use, M/M, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-17 01:10:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12354309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/henrywinters/pseuds/henrywinters
Summary: Unraveling from his failed engagement, Wonsik hastes to fill the void left by his former fiancé; and rushing through the motions of romance, quite unsure where it may lead him, he hopes to find a happiness in the end. Or at least something like it.





	The Wanting

**Author's Note:**

> this is a work in progress ~ pls be aware of that before you begin reading. that being said, this will be a more casually updated story, meaning i won't update it regularly (though i will try my very best to post another part within the next week or so). it's dark, it's sad, it's angsty what can i say!
> 
> love you guys always for your support and interest ~ ♡

 

_I learned the lesson_

_about bad ideas —_

 

 

 

 

I.

The hour was very late or very early depending on how one looked at it. The sun breached the east in a mellow stream of metallic grey and Wonsik watched as the light came up over the buildings very slowly at first and then quickly as if when the wind blew, it blew with it the sun's light over the city. It was a severe light, strangely opulent as it fell over parked cars and bed bound passersby who walked, dazed, by the street-side with exhaustion so deeply embedded within them it showed through. Wonsik watched the street around him where the vendors were coming out of the subway stations and the lamps had started to flicker out as the sun beamed the color of dirty fur from the backseat of a car he did not own. A boy lay with his head between Wonsik's legs and his mouth open and eager and unfamiliar against his skin, but the coke haze within his head made it impossible to move. Wonsik lay with his head against the window and his legs outstretched across the seat with his hands in the boy's hair, understanding with slow-moving realization that he couldn't recall the boy's name. But in this moment, it was difficult to find reason to remember it.

 

They had met in a club Wonsik could hazily recall. It had either been The Fountainhead or Paragon. But this detail like so many others fell lousy by the wayside and Wonsik looked down at the boy in his lap who mouthed at his cock with fervor Wonsik could never repay. He wondered if the boy remembered him just as poorly.

 

He was from Paris. That was all that really mattered. This fact blew up large like the burning of a neon sign in the very center of Wonsik's head. **PARIS**. That had been why he had so eagerly jumped into the backseat when normally he'd have waited to get home; it was why Wonsik had kissed the boy at all, with growing contempt that settled ugly within him—Paris. He wondered what time it was there.

 

The boy between his legs lifted his head and his mouth was red and glossed as enamel as he touched Wonsik's face with a trembling hand and kissed him. He spoke with his hands in torpid movement, guiding Wonsik onto his back with his legs spread further apart and the heat of the bluing morning burning on the back window.

 

There had been a time before, a long time ago, when Wonsik could look at the clock and know without thinking what time it was in Europe. He remembered London and Berlin and Vienna; Budapest and Prague—all the hours stamped into his memory like a gold-plate across his brain, because these were the places Jaehwan would attend in the summer. Runway shows. Photography shoots. Commercials for the newest Louis Vuitton. Years spent chasing hours Wonsik would never get back and now he lay still beneath a boy he did not know, unable to remember the time anymore. It must be late there, he decided. For it was very early now. Was Jaehwan asleep in his room by the water, in a bed of down with all the light of the night shining in? Was he at a fashion show with a cosmopolitan in his delicate hand, trembling with spirits in his blood? Was he lying somewhere with his arms around another body the way Wonsik was now, holding on with a fierceness as he was thrust against as the car filled with light? He imagined this was all possible; he imagined it and his heart flared.

 

“You alright?” asked the boy, his accent unusual and not quite right. His voice pressed hard as bone between Wonsik's ears. His head was hazy and his body was stiff and he could not feel the tips of his fingers, but Wonsik nodded for it seemed necessary and he did not want the boy looking at him so closely anymore. Despite the strangeness he felt with his head on fire and Jaehwan lurking at the edge of his mind, Wonsik found himself able to come moments later when the boy pressed into him and the sun rose heavy over the city. Its mellow light broke free and fell clear over the car's back window like showering gold.

 

The boy held him as he came and it was difficult to breathe but Wonsik held still with his eyes closed, unable to find a firm thought to latch onto. He breathed out his mouth, panting softly, wrapped in warmth and sweat and he allowed his mind to flicker and then blink out for there was nothing to think of anymore that would make thinking easier. It was better not to think at all.

 

 

 

 

 

It was worse on the subway. Thought process unable to reboot. The boy had offered to drive him home but Wonsik could not, would not, let him know where he lived. So he sat very still on the train and watched the woman across the aisle who sat with a small dog wrapped between her hands. The dog was very small indeed. It was a wonder that something so small could live in a world so large and loud and terribly ugly. As Wonsik watched the dog, the dog watched back, and he did not care what he looked like when the subway came to a stop and he stood and the dog barked, startling him like a child against a reprimanding adult. Someone snickered, but by then Wonsik was off the train and heading for the stairs; then he was beneath the sun that grew larger by the minute and very hot overhead. It felt like summer all over again. It felt terrible.

 

As he walked up the street-side to the bakery across the apartment building where he had lived for all of time, he spotted Sanghyuk on the entrance steps. His complexion was terrible and his hair lay over his eyes in long damp strings so white it reflected the sun like the silver bumpers on a taxi cab. When Wonsik stopped by the foot of the stairs, looking up at him, Sanghyuk sighed deeply with all his body leaning forward as if he had held onto the air inside him for all the time he had waited.

 

“You took a long time,” said Sanghyuk.

 

“The subway was packed,” said Wonsik.

 

“Why didn't he bring you home?”

 

“Who,” Wonsik asked.

 

“The boy,” said Sanghyuk. “The one you left with.”

 

Tempted to say he had been left, deserted, because he didn't want to talk about the boy ever again, he bristled and instead turned to the apartments and looked up at the tall building, up at his own floor that leered twelve stories above them.

 

He said, “I felt like taking the subway. Are you coming up?”

 

“I guess so.”

 

Sanghyuk waited until Wonsik unlocked the door and closed it behind them to take the small baggie from the inside pocket of his jacket and for this Wonsik felt a touch of affection for him. Sanghyuk was doped but he was not dumb and he leered with a shine in his eyes that verged on playful, but fell flat too soon.

 

“Do you have a mirror? Something I can cut this up on.”

 

“The bookshelf,” Wonsik said. “Use a book, I don't care.”

 

The calendar above the stove said it was Tuesday but that couldn't possibly be right. What had happened to Monday? Hadn't it been Sunday the night before when the moon had been full in an overcast sky, or had that been another time, sometime before? Wonsik had snorted too much to find peace in his own head and so stood by the stove with water boiling for a cup of earl grey he was sure he would not drink but perhaps if he tried, he would surprise himself.

 

“Where did you go?” Sanghyuk called, quiet but echoing for the walls were bare and the air con had not turned on and the sounds of the neighbors were muted by the hour. “Did you go somewhere nice?”

 

“Nowhere at all.”

 

“Worth it?”

 

“Hmm,” Wonsik hummed.

 

“Was it worth it?”

 

Wonsik watched the water boil and could not come up with an answer. He thought how unworthy everything was no matter what. He touched his upper lip where the skin was raw and his nose burned in the middle of his face and the promise of sleep was so far away it fell away all at once; he knew he would not sleep until night came again.

 

Sanghyuk came up beside him in the kitchen and asked him, “Are you feeling alright?” and because it was the second time he had been asked that night, Wonsik felt worse than alright but he nodded and moved away into the bedroom where the curtains were drawn and the blinds stayed closed. He heard when Sanghyuk took his line. But then there he was, all twenty-four years of him, bulky and large and taking up all the doorway with the mirror in his hand.

 

He asked, “Did you want some?”

 

“My head,” Wonsik said. He undressed by the bed and stood in his briefs with his heartbeat erratic in his throat but still took the rolled bill and the line nearest him in a single sweeping breath.

 

Sanghyuk finished what was on the mirror. Then he lay back on the bed and Wonsik lay beside him and the room began to spin but it was not a bad spin. It soothed and it calmed and Wonsik closed his eyes and felt the blood pour into his head.

 

“I have work tonight,” he said. “In a few hours.”

 

“You should sleep.”

 

“I can't sleep.”

 

“I'll help you,” Sanghyuk offered. He nosed at Wonsik's cheek and breathed warm against his ear and his hand lay low on Wonsik's belly but nothing stirred for Wonsik was tired – so tired – his blood pumped slowly as if he was half dead already.

 

He let Sanghyuk kiss him and touch him and urge from him a reaction that would not come and when Sanghyuk realized this, he flushed a deep red that Wonsik found unable to turn away from. So he laid his hand between Sanghyuk's legs and was guided by hand into his underwear where Sanghyuk stirred and grew hard within Wonsik's palm and they lay like this, hands and fingers and all their thoughts intertwined in the cool darkness of a room devoid of light and life and the only sound was that of Sanghyuk's panting and the warm dampness of his skin rubbing against Wonsik's palm. For this moment, as the coke filled the spaces between thought, everything felt normal. It was ordinary. Wonsik was not alone and he would never be, not right now, not again—at least not until the high wore off. But by then, he would be asleep. The sounds of the city would be very far away and nothing would matter but the tiredness of his bones and the dreams in his head as the day whittled away and was replaced by coming night.

 

The air con reeled alive and came in spurts of cold from the ceiling vent like a downpour of wind that chilled the hair on Wonsik’s nape. He shivered with his hand down the front of Sanghyuk’s pants, all the warmth inside his bones rushing to the center of his head. He watched, mesmerized, as Sanghyuk arched his neck and the bone inside his throat pierced sharp against his skin and all the color that had faded from him filled his cheeks deep as the ocean, bursting red hot across his face. He came quietly. It had always been this way: his face serene and not a tick about him; the only sound the sound of his breathing, hitched but steady as his fingers curled and he trembled lightly as if an ebbing current touched and then fell away from him in the same exact second. And when it was over, it was over. He did not move and he did not speak; he lay with his head on the pillows and his pulse pounding in the side of his throat—the only sign that there was a heart still beating, for he would look to Wonsik stunned and mute, falling back into his doped haze as the world came back to him.

 

He came this time with a hand clasped around Wonsik’s wrist and this was the only difference. Then he lay in his silence with a crease between his brows that mimicked anxiety and he did not open his eyes for a very long time as Wonsik wandered the bedroom in crawling slowness to find a towel, an old shirt. He found neither and took the shirt off the floor he had worn to the club and cleaned the mess that spread out sticky across Sanghyuk’s belly and the waist of his jeans and then he lay on the bed with his mouth pressed to the heated, sweaty plain of Sanghyuk’s forehead.

 

Wonsik was still not tired but he thought if he remained motionless – if he watched the window and the arching of the light – for long enough he could pretend sleep had taken him; his vision would blank and it would be easy, for it was always easy to stop seeing when one wanted to.

 

“You feel OK?” Wonsik whispered to Sanghyuk, to himself, to no one at all.

 

Sanghyuk reached up and touched Wonsik’s cheek with fingertips that felt too used and rough and he scratched the spot below Wonsik’s jaw like a beloved pet and said nothing. This was answer enough for there was never a right answer to begin with.

 

 

 

 

 

II.

Evening came when sleep did not and Wonsik roused himself from the pool of blankets wrapped all around him and looked down at Sanghyuk who slept, snoring, with his mouth open and his nose useless. Wonsik had lain in the dark with his eyes closed and fluttering madly beneath his lids until he could stand no more and as he walked the apartment in search of familiarity – his tea cold on the counter, a half-open bag of uncut bread, a candle with cigarette ash heaped inside of it – he stopped by the balcony window and looked out at the haze of mid-evening that looked so much like dawn. The glass was cold but it was heat that rushed in and touched him as he opened the door; it would be a warm night, but he dressed in a large coat with his button-up beneath it. He wore his sneakers, his Ray-Bans, a cigarette behind his ear and the ghost of a smile at the corner of his mouth. He would have to keep it there until closing time, if he lasted so long. Then he left the apartment and Sanghyuk sleeping and stepped out onto the city streets where the cabs brayed and the passersby paid him no mind, because here he was nobody but himself which was nobody at all.

 

 

 

 

Work was not unlike home. It was just as discomforting as silence in a windstorm; Regional Watch, an advertising firm. It was a glum building that stood tall and grey and loomed like a storm cloud between two districts as if caught between two places at once. Wonsik looked up at this Godly building, caught within its leering shadow and felt his belly churn. He brimmed with disdain so severe it burbled like bile at the back of his throat and left his mouth watering. But it was a feeling he was accustomed to. He ascended the steep stairs to the entrance hall and thrust his sweating hands into the pockets of his jacket and shouldered through the revolving doors.

 

Nobody welcomed him for there was nobody there. Pale luminescence reflected off shoddy tiles and the echo of his singular footfalls in a hallway abandoned; Wonsik waited by the lift with a ghost drip coating his throat like soot. Upstairs was where life collected: the clattering of keyboards, open windows and the echo of the city; a corridor opened from the lift and went down into the break room and beyond that was the writing room and where the storyboards were put together. It was here Wonsik went, feeling lousy and tired and dragging his feet. He moved like the dead; able to meander the computer desks by memory alone for his eyes were not working well and what was left inside his head had been melted down and leaked out as if his mind too was unable to stay together.

 

He smiled to those who stopped by to say hello, good evening, how had the weekend been? And those that lingered, looking deep into his face as if in search of something particular; and when someone patted his shoulder, Wonsik smiled and turned away.

 

Lee Boyoung, a very petite, very severe young woman, stepped up beside him and asked: “How are you feeling today?”

 

He looked at her. He hoped to find the double meaning of her words in the dense clarity of her eyes, but there was nothing and he knew very well he was being paranoid. A blush crept up his throat.

 

“I’m fine,” said Wonsik.

 

“I’m awfully sorry,” Lee Boyoung said. She touched his shoulder with meaning this time, pressing the weight of her palm down against hard bone as if hoping to press her condolences into him.

 

Wonsik watched her leave and grew discomforted. The hair on his nape bristled as he swept his eyes across the room and found many faces peering back at him. They looked away as he caught sight of them, rushed back to work and their murmured nothings. A feeling sparked low in his belly that he was unsure of—was it shame? perhaps contempt—that swelled and rose and grew too heavy.

 

“Lee Boyoung-ah?” Wonsik called. “What are you sorry about?”

 

“Well—” She paused and the silence grew large and verged on terrible before she tucked her hair behind her ears and said: “I saw the magazine. Most of us did.”

 

“The magazine,” Wonsik repeated.

 

“No one had any idea.” Then, like a compliment, she said, “You hid it very well.” When she turned away her hair fanned out behind her in a wave of finality and she was gone.

 

Wonsik looked back toward the room and could no longer stand the heated compassion that floundered and drowned him and in an instant, he was out of the writing room and back into the corridor that stretched infinite all around. The sounds of his footfalls was all that kept him company and they sounded awful to him. At the lift, he jabbed the button hard enough to cause pain to splinter up his finger and into his hand and as he stood waiting with his finger in his mouth, sucking it like a child would a thumb, the doors opened and Taekwoon stepped out, but not before their eyes met and a hearty silence fell over them.

 

Taekwoon said hello and nodded his head in a halfhearted attempt of a bow that Wonsik returned, and as they shared the silence and the elevator doors clattered shut again, Wonsik noticed the file of papers Taekwoon held to his chest. Storyboard material.

 

Wonsik asked, “Did you see the magazine?” and nearly laughed as Taekwoon faltered.

 

“This morning.”

 

“Yeah?” Wonsik rubbed his nose and wished suddenly for a drink, for a line, whichever came quicker. “Which, uh— which magazine is that?”

 

“Vogue.”

 

“Vogue?”

 

“Paris.”

 

“Vogue Paris?”

 

“You haven’t seen it?” asked Taekwoon.

 

The elevator chimed and opened. A woman stepped out. Wonsik regarded her silently and she him and he wondered if she had read the magazine too.

 

“No, do you have it?” Then, when Taekwoon told him silently with a nervous cut of his eyes, a chewed bottom lip, that he did not: “Where can I get a copy?”

 

“The magazine kiosk, I assume.”

 

Perspiring and feeling ill, Wonsik touched his forehead and then Taekwoon’s arm. He pressed the elevator button again as Taekwoon continued down the hall toward the rooms.

 

He turned only once to ask, “Wonsik-ah, are you going to be OK?” But Wonsik hadn’t an answer and so stepped into the open lift without word.

 

Once he was out of the building and on the streets, doused in late evening light as the sun fell low in the west, he followed the sidewalk down to where the road came in and cut him off. And then he followed it some more until he found a kiosk. He fumbled through subscription magazines, none of which he wanted, until he found Vogue Korea. He touched the tender and asked, “Do you have Paris? Vogue Paris?”

 

“Somewhere here.”

 

“Somewhere? Where? Here—” He lifted up Vogue Korea and then pointed to Vogue Italy. He said, “It’s not here. I need Paris.”

 

“Somewhere, it’s there.” The tender riffled through the shelves at alarmingly slow pace and as every second added up and all the light began to dim Wonsik was certain he would faint.

 

Finally— “Here,” said the tender.

 

Wonsik paid and left for the bus stop meters south of Regional Watch and as he sat close to the curb, able to feel the ebb of traffic but unable to deter himself from the wafer-thin pages of the magazine – fluttering them back and forth, losing his place twice and cursing because of it – Wonsik shifted through the columns until finally, there, spread out across two pages as if he was too bright a star to contain, was Jaehwan. The headline read: _LEE KEN, MAD ABOUT HIS BOY._

 

He couldn’t stomach the article. There was quite a lot to read. Three pages, in fact, and all of them turned indecipherable as Wonsik sat near that busy curb with the sound of his racing heart all he could hear until finally it consumed him; his vision pulsed with his blood and all the nerves inside him tarnished.

 

MAD ABOUT HIS BOY. Who was his boy now?

 

Wonsik rolled the magazine into a tight tube and slipped it into the waist of his jeans. Then he stood and he waited while he smoked a cigarette for the seven o’clock bus to roll into view.

 

 

 

 

 

Sanghyuk was still asleep. Of course, he was. Wonsik had not been gone longer than two hours; he leaned in the bedroom doorway and watched momentarily as Sanghyuk slept soundly, his terribly large frame curled up into something very small.

 

“Hyuk-ah?”

 

He did not stir.

 

If he had not felt he needed something so badly, Wonsik would have collected his things. He would have left downtown and burned the magazine in some farce exaggerated ritual and then perhaps he would have stopped in town and had something to eat before coming back home to bed. But his head ached and he had not slept and he wished madly for consolation for he could think of nothing but Jaehwan’s brazen smile and the crescent moons of his handsome eyes; he had smiled like that at Wonsik once, not very long ago.

 

“Hyuk-ah.” He touched Sanghyuk’s face. “Wake up now, it’s late.”

 

“How late?” Sanghyuk groaned.

 

“Very late.”

 

Sanghyuk refused to move. He spoke with his face angled toward the bed. “Is it tomorrow?”

 

“No, it’s today.”

 

“Then it’s not very late.”

 

With a smile, Wonsik crawled across warm sheets and pressed his body close to Sanghyuk’s own. He was warm and comfortable and when he turned and placed his arms around Wonsik’s middle, he was large too.

 

“Something happened, Hyukie, and I want you to wake up.”

 

Only then did Sanghyuk open his dazzled eyes. Tired and far away, like moons out of orbit, they struggled for focus. “What’s wrong? You get in a fight or something?”

 

“No, I’ll tell you later. I need something.”

 

Sanghyuk touched his eyes and faltered a moment as he tried to sit up, his bones creaking beneath the heavy weight of exhaustion. “What’s up?”

 

“Can you call your guy? Can he deliver? Or—I dunno, I’ll go pick up.”

 

“What, right now?” He looked to the window and saw the light there, still burning. “It’s early.”

 

“I need something now.”

 

Steadily, but without contempt, Sanghyuk searched Wonsik for answers he could not find. “I have a Valium, you can have it. We’ll pick up later, OK? When the sun goes down. I don’t think anyone deals right now, it’s work hours, right?” He laughed and shoved a hand into his pocket where he pulled out two pills. He placed one in Wonsik’s palm and the other on his own tongue and dry swallowed it in a way Wonsik could never perfect.

 

“What happened?” Sanghyuk whispered as he fell back into bed.

 

“Sleep now, I’ll tell you later.” And for a long time Wonsik lay with an arm around Sanghyuk’s slumbering head, fingers in his hair and his mind wandering absently around ill-remembered memories of Jaehwan at Santa Monica pier, two years before they had bought the apartment together; Jaehwan boarding a flight to Vienna, misty-eyed and jaded, because Wonsik could not come with.

 

Jaehwan. Mad about his boy. Hopelessly devoted.

 

Wonsik took the pill in the kitchen with a glass of faucet water and leaned against the far wall until the ache in his bones resided and his knees began to wobble and he felt very light on his feet as if all the blood within his body had been replaced by air. Then he sulked into the living area and sat on the sofa, staring at the blank television that reflected nothing but his own morose likeness; pitted black and utterly dulled.

 

The pill started to work. It took from him all possible thought and left him drained and lifeless with his head craned back and his eyes on the ceiling, unseeing, for he was tired and he had lost his head. He slept, but for how long he was unsure.

 

 

 

 

 

III.

“I thought you were dead,” Sanghyuk said. It had become very late. The light was gone and the apartment lay dormant and dim and swept in strange light from the sallow ceiling fan. “Lying there with your eyes open like that, you looked dead.”

 

“I’m not dead,” said Wonsik.

 

“Do you wish you were?”

 

“Yeah, I wish I was.”

 

Sanghyuk bubbled with laughter. He touched a finger to the tip of Wonsik’s reddened nose. “Too bad,” he said. “Cause you’re not dying tonight.” He had showered but wore the same clothes he had shown up in and he smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and sleep and soap.

 

“Let’s pick up,” said Sanghyuk.

 

“I don’t want to go.”

 

“OK, I’ll pick up.” He stood and was stopped by a hand on his wrist.

 

“I don’t want to stay here alone.”

 

“What _do_ you want?”

 

“I don’t want anything,” Wonsik despaired. He felt very foolish as he stretched out on the sofa with his hands over his face and Sanghyuk peering down at him like a man ruined. He didn’t have to look to know the way Sanghyuk watched him: smitten, with a curl about his mouth thin as smoke.

 

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Sanghyuk said.

 

“It’s embarrassing.”

 

“I don’t care. Tell me what happened.”

 

Silence came and grew very large and became terribly heavy as Sanghyuk sunk down onto his knees beside the sofa and touched a hand to the side of Wonsik’s neck where his pulse fluttered merciless like a trapped bird stuck for all of time.

 

He said, “Wonsikie, you have to tell me or I’m leaving to go pick up and if you don’t go with me, then I’m going to go out and not come back.”

 

“You’re a liar. An awful liar. You can’t even lie with a straight face.”

 

It was true. Sanghyuk smiled and beamed like a child with a dirty joke and he turned away to hide the smile Wonsik already caught sight of. Then he turned back and he looked very serious as he laid a hand against Wonsik’s cheek; his palm searing hot against chilled skin.

 

He said, “Just tell me.”

 

“Remember,” Wonsik began eventually after the light turned white and the pill began to wear off and he felt a little more whole, a little more human. He sat up. “Remember when Jaehwan called from Paris and said he was never coming back.”

 

Sanghyuk kept very still and quiet.

 

“You said he had probably met someone, do you remember that, Hyukie? You said he was probably falling over all the models and he didn’t know how to get his head out of his ass and come back home.”

 

“Sure,” Sanghyuk said. “I remember.”

 

“You were right.” Wonsik fell back onto the couch, heavy with defeat and heat sweltering his lower belly.

 

“How do you know?”

 

“There was an article in a magazine. A full article about the boy he had met.” It was then Wonsik remembered the book in his waistband and took it from his pants and laid it out over the cushions for Sanghyuk to look at. “He’s some model, photographer; some guy. I dunno. They met in Paris, but he’s Korean.” Wonsik laughed. “Can you believe that? What is that? Fate?”

 

“Fate doesn’t exist,” said Sanghyuk.

 

“Sure it does.”

 

“It doesn’t. Ask anyone.” He took the magazine but didn’t open it. He folded it up into his back pocket much the way Wonsik had rolled it into his pants and then he stood and he took Wonsik’s hand and pulled him up. “Let’s go pick up. Stop thinking about it for now.”

 

“But I can’t.”

 

“You can.” He wrapped his arm around Wonsik’s shoulders and pulled him out of the apartment with the shoes barely on his feet and his head reeling and all his bones begging to be put to bed.

 

It was after the bus came and went that they stepped onto the subway cart some miles from the complex. Sanghyuk took the magazine from his back pocket and pointed to the article where a small oblong photograph was edited between paragraphs and said, “Is that him?”

 

Wonsik would not look. He looked already once before and he was certain it was him. Some guy named Hakyeon. Some stranger. A nobody. “Maybe.”

 

“He’s not _that_ good looking.”

 

“He’s a model. A Vogue model.”

 

“Yeah, but I mean for a Vogue model, he’s not that good looking.”

 

 

 

 

 

By the time they picked up and had a line each, and then a line each once more in the back room of a bar that neither of them had been to before, the tiredness had left Wonsik’s head and he found himself in the cool dark of a club somewhere downtown. He vaguely knew where they were. It was someplace they had been once or twice but never long enough to become comfortable with. His head was fine and he felt very nice with his blood swarming his temples. He took another line in the bathroom off the back of Sanghyuk’s hand and let himself be kissed and kissed back but only once before they left the bathroom and were back on the dance floor.

 

Sanghyuk was speaking to a woman at the bar. Wonsik drank a gin and tonic. The lights flared and glittered and made his head swim as the club began to blink and it was difficult to see through the pulsing light. All he knew was the ground beneath his feet and that too was beginning to sway.

 

Wonsik reached for the bar and steadied himself and was touched by Sanghyuk’s hand a moment later with his breath warm in his ear as he said, “That girl wants to dance with you.”

 

“I can’t dance.”

 

“Yes, you can. Go dance.”

 

“I don’t _want_ to dance.”

 

“Just go fucking dance.”

 

Sanghyuk took the gin and tonic and placed his hand low on the small of Wonsik’s back and pushed him, little by little, toward the girl at the bar who was watching them with a light in her eyes. She sparkled, standing there, with hair that reached all the way down her back. Very suddenly Wonsik wanted to touch it. He wanted to know if it was real. Did hair grow that long? But he thought it would be rude to ask and knew it would be better to keep quiet, so he placed his hand on her back and felt her hair this way and concluded that no, it was not real, it didn’t feel right; or perhaps it was him that was not right. But he guided her out to the dance floor as the music picked up and the lights flickered and began to strobe and it seemed in this time that the world moved in very slow motion, between beats of light, all the bodies and limbs and the whole world tilting and swaying and looking very odd.

 

The girl leaned in with her voice loud and smelling sweet. She said, “I’m really sorry about your husband.”

 

“My husband?” Wonsik yelled.

 

“Your friend told me about it. It’s such a shame.”

 

“I guess so.”

 

He looked at the floor and wished to be anywhere but here and watched his feet and he forced himself to keep a rhythm that was difficult to find. The girl leaned closer again and asked him, “What was he sick with?”

 

“Sick with?”

 

She nodded. Wonsik smiled.

 

“Probably sick of me,” he laughed. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

 

But then the girl halted, very quickly, like something coin operated and she stood there like all her life had been used up and glared under those sparkling lights. She said with a drop of her voice, “That’s an awful thing to say.”

 

“Is it?” Wonsik wanted to know. “I don’t think so.”

 

“How can you laugh about it?”

 

“Well, if I can’t, then who will?”

 

He wished terribly to have his drink back, for the lights to stop strobing the way that they were. He felt sick and cold and the girl watched him with heat in her eyes as if she wanted nothing more than to deck him. He willed her to. He thought if she hit him then he could black out and then finally find the sleep he had been meaning to find the last couple days, but she did no such thing.

 

She continued to look at him with disbelief and then shouted so loudly her voice roared over the music and all those around them stopped and stared and looked at them.

 

“How can you joke about your dead husband?”

 

Wonsik stopped dancing at the same moment the girl spun away with her hair sweeping behind her like a blanket of black feathers and she hurried away, passing the bar where Sanghyuk stood with the gin and tonic and something orange in a clear squat glass.

 

Wonsik stared at him evenly, too fucked up to find anger. He felt very stupid.

 

“Dead?” he said.

 

Sanghyuk looked at him and burst out laughing. “My bad. I didn’t think she’d mention it. No one in their right mind would mention it, would they?”

 

“You told her he’s dead?”

 

“Better than telling her you got dumped by your fiancé for a Vogue model.”

 

“You said he wasn’t that good looking,” Wonsik said.

 

“No, but he’s still a Vogue model.”

 

Sanghyuk gave Wonsik the gin and tonic, but Wonsik did not want it anymore. The ice had melted and the glass was slippery against his warm palm so he set it on the counter to be taken away and once it was, he sat on a bar stool. He swung his feet like a child. He watched the dance floor and zoned out and groped for a thought that could keep him grounded, but there was no thought in his head and so he floundered and floated away and could think of nothing at all except the ghost crinkle of Jaehwan’s smiling eyes.

 

“Do you want a line?” asked Sanghyuk.

 

“No, my head.”

 

He took Wonsik’s face between large hands and stroked his pulsing temples with the calloused pads of his thumbs. “What’s wrong with your head?”

 

“It hurts.”

 

“I’ll get you a drink.”

 

But as soon as Sanghyuk moved away, Wonsik swayed onto his feet and left the club.

 

Outside, it was worse than he had anticipated. Streets full of cabs and passersby that bumped and pushed and pulled their way through the growing crowds of club-goers. Wonsik stood beneath the ghost light of the street lamps, sweeping the sidewalks with vacant eyes until finally he began to move. He didn’t know where he was exactly nor where he was to go, but he kept on and kept going until he found himself beside a phone booth in the middle of a closed park.

 

Inside the booth, he paid the toll and dialed the first number that he could remember and it was appalling, he later thought, that the first number he thought of was Jaehwan’s old beeper. It didn’t connect. Of course, it didn’t connect. Jaehwan hadn’t used that number for years.

 

He tried again with the same coins and dialed long distance into Paris and let the phone ring until the machine answered. Then he hung up and dialed again and waited and waited with his heart soaring high into his throat and all the coke inside his head beginning to disperse into granulated snow that fell over his eyes and into his heart and froze him half to death. It was on the second call that the phone was answered, but it wasn’t Jaehwan’s voice that had picked up. It was someone softer, a little older. They said, _bonjour?_ and when no answer came, they demanded: _Hell-oh?_

 

Wonsik hung up with lead heavy in his blood and his heart in his mouth. He leaned against the glass side of the booth and felt the first trickle of reality fall into him as the coke began to wear off. He could no longer tell if he was high or drunk or simply tired. But as the night waned and became terribly dark, still he stood there in the confinement of the phone booth. Wonsik looked at his wrist and the watch he kept there and knew very suddenly, with striking clarity, what time it was in Paris. Because of this, he touched the throbbing sides of his head and sank down onto the floor with his head between his knees and wondered what it would be like to be on the moon, on Mars, in Andromeda with his head made of air complete without thought or memory. Then he began to cry.


End file.
